Three students who shared an apartment wanted to buy a cheep TV and found an old but fully working one in a thrift store with a $30 price tag attached. Each paid $10 to the guy in the store, who said he’d deliver it the day after. The students left happy.
The guy then discovered that the revised price, written on the back of the tag, was $25. Realising the students had paid too much, and being sort of honest by nature, he decided to give them some of their cash back.
He knew that the overpaid $5 didn’t divide evenly into 3, so this is how he split it up: he’d give each student $1 back and keep the remaining $2 himself to cover delivery.
Here’s the puzzle: If each student paid $9 in the end, and the store guy kept $2, then, somewhere, $1 remains unaccounted for: 3 times $9 equals $27, plus $2 the store keeper kept for himself, totals $29. Where did the other dollar go?
interesting puzzle. something about it makes it hard to think clearly about the problem… It’s like a logical backflip…
first of all the fact that there are 3 different students and not 1 is just added confusion, so consider there to be only 1 student.
The student gives him 30 dollars, gets a refund of 3, making his paid total 27, and the tv guy keeps 2 dollars
27 + 2 = 29 so we still have a missing looney.
What people do here is forget that the tv guy is the one who has 27 dollars, not the kids.
you give me 30 dollars, and i give you back 3 dollars. you have 3 and i have 27. 27 + 3 = 30.
27 dollars is the total that the kids payed in the end, so thats how much the tv guy has. you wouldnt add the two dollar delivery fee to this because it is already included. you are supposed to add the change left over from his purchase, which is 3 dollars.
Strictly speaking you can treat the 25 dolalr cost as a negative and then factoring in the 2 dollars will give you the base price of the tv. people don’t realize that’s how it would work and end up double factoring the 2 dollar delivery fee and never factor the 3 dollar refund.
he didn’t keep the remaing $2. he kept the remain $3. people are sometimes too clear. 5 - 3 = 2 seems correct in small picture, but in the BIG picture. You have 30 - 3 = 27.
You wrote in the orignal post that he "keep the remaining $2 himself ". When he gave back $9 to each, he essetnaily gave back $27, so he kept $3 not the $2.
The $2 is an aside that mislead people. 5 - 3 = 2. correct in small picture. but in big picture 30 - 27 = 3. I mean, if everyone paid $9, then $27, how can the fucker keep $2? cuz ppl think 5 - 3 = 2, while it’s actually 30 - 27 = 3
he didn’t give back 9 dollars to each kid. i don’t know where you got that from. and yes, he did keep the 2 dollars. aswell as keeping the 25 dollars. he gave 3 dollars back. you make no sense
Having realized he made a mistake in price, the store owner gave each kid $1.00 back because the extra $5.00 did not divide evenly into 3. He did keep the extra $2.00. So each kid ultimately paid $9 a piece =ing $27.
Yes, the store owner does have the extra $1.00. And 27+2 = 29.
– and I think it’s possible that the store owner did not add correctly. He has the extra dollar, but he failed to see that there was one extra dollar left. That is two times the store owner wasn’t paying attention.
I think you’re right a.r. Y’know, there are some store keepers you just can’t trust! Shoulda bought the TV from a reputable dealer in NY instead - costing the full $30. Some kids y’just can’t teach!
Because we reverse things left-right. I assume you’re talking about things like writing on a page, correct? Well, imagine you had your name written on a piece of paper. You look at it, seems correct (left-to-right). Now you want to face it to the mirror. What do you do? You rotate it around the up-down axis, which means you take the left side and flip it onto the right side. You could very well rotate it around the left-right axis and flip the bottom onto the top, in which case the reflection will maintain the correct left-to-right orientation but not the up-and-down one.
I think of the problem of reflection in the same way as Churro - as being a matter of the geometry of light wave reflection. The waves (considered as straight lines) reflect of the image, onto the mirror’s surface and kind of cross over when they’re reflected back again. That explains the reversal of the image, anyway. But I still wonder, why is the geometry such that the reflection is horizontal and not vertical? Churro also said he had other ideas on the matter which might improve on my thinking.
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